National Theatre: Amadeus
Thursday 2pm EDT / 7pm EST (available for one week)
Thanks to its NT Live series, London’s venerable National Theatre has a treasure trove of excellent recordings of past productions—and
it has been generously streaming one play per week for free on YouTube. That series, alas, comes to an end today but it goes out with a bang: the National’s superb 2016 revival of Peter Shaffer’s
Amadeus. Lucian Msamati stars as Schaffer’s version of the 18th-century Viennese court composer Antonio Salieri, driven mad with envy of the young and bestial musical genius Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, played by Adam Gillen. “The audacious decision to have an actual full-on orchestra—the Southbank Sinfonia—wandering the stage playing Mozart’s greatest hits doesn’t overpower the human drama in Michael Longhurst’s stupendous revival,” wrote Andrzej Lukowski in his
five-star Time Out London review. “The genius of Msamati’s performance is its restraint…As he pulls down Mozart’s prospects, he does so without cackling malice but with the trudge of a jobsworth civil servant turning down a benefits claim. And yet operatic levels of emotion bubble away under it.”
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